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Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

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Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#271

Post by jopsen »

ttul wrote: post #207

I run a large infrastructure SaaS on AWS. Our bill is frightening and so we work diligently to find ways to cut it down. Yet, despite other cloud providers offering much lower prices on CPU, storage, and bandwidth, we stick with AWS for the following reason: If we were to switch to a cheaper provider, we would have to do a lot of building ourselves, which would require hiring talent and keeping that talent employed c…

Also if you build it yourself it carries risk -- each project could fail, or take extra time.

Where as buying AWS, has low risk.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#272

Post by srtjstjsj »

bsenftner wrote: post #123
ti_ranger wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For my own startup, I built a small cluster of 17 servers for just beneath $55K, and that had a month-to-month expense of $600 placed in a co-lo. In comparison, the same setup at AWS would be $96K per month. Why would you build exactly the same setup in AWS as for on-prem, unless your objective is to (dishonestly) show that on-prem is cheaper? Lift-and-shift-to-the-cloud is known to be more expensive, because you a…

> Why would you build exactly the same setup in AWS as for on-prem... It was far better to invest a little up front, and maintain at $600 my operations than the same for $96K a month, that's why. I never "lifted and shifted", I built and deployed, with physical servers, a 3-way duplicated environment that flew like a hot rod. At a fraction of cloud's expense.

Are you claiming that you knew exactly how powerful you needed your machines to be, before you launched? Or are your machines running at 25% utilization which AWS would charge substantially less for?

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#273

Post by jdub »

tluyben2 wrote: post #51
jdub wrote: post #9

Are there tens of regions around the world? Are there multiple AZs within a region that are single-digit milliseconds apart? Can I autoscale? Is there a managed load balancer? Do I have to manage my own database instances and availability? Do I have access to hundreds of other services for things that I don't want to spend time managing myself? Aren't we years beyond the 1:1 cost comparison for a single server argume…

No, almost no-one needs any of that. The depressing amount of money that goes to AWS for little reason but 'because it's the safe choice and everyone does it' is pretty amazing. In tech/programming we often say 'use the right tool for the job' and yet everyone reaches for the hammer that is AWS when hosting is mentioned.

Every company I've worked for in the last ten years has needed all of the above, and I like to work for small companies (fewer than 100 people). Only in the last couple of years have I had any interest or need to branch out to the other clouds, largely because they're doing specific things really well.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#274

Post by srtjstjsj »

freeone3000 wrote: post #183
lvh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible that "many" firms do this, but given AWS' growth numbers that would imply they don't really spend meaningful amounts to begin with. Counterpoint: I've seen a great many false economies with people trying to go on-prem and do alternative hosting because they don't think the AWS premium for e.g. GPU instances is worth it. I don't think that has generally worked out well.

The AWS premium for GPU instances is absolutely not worth it. You don't hear about people running local GPU compute clusters because it's not newsworthy -- it's obvious . Put a few workstations behind a switch, fire up torch.distributed, you're done. And after two months, you've beaten the AWS spend for the same amount of GPU compute, even if only 50% of the time is spent training. Timesharing is done with shell acco…

What if you want 10x the GPU for one month to build a model?

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#276

Post by throwaway2048 »

bluedino wrote: post #270
wazoox wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you remember that for years, Stack Overflow ran out of a couple of well administered servers. YAGNI. KISS. People forget the basics because "infrastructure astronautics" is fun, and it probably helps make a beautiful resume, too.

When you look at something like how Stack Exchange moved physical servers to a new datacenter, you can see where AWS benefits you. Not all startups have the server and networking know-how to pull that kind of stuff off, or even set it up in the first place. https://blog.serverfault.com/2015/03/05/how-we-upgrade-a-liv...

Its not like AWS services themselves require zero knowledge in their use (especially if you dont wanna be billed massive amounts)

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#277

Post by jdub »

anticristi wrote: post #160
KingOfCoders wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every infrastructure is as secure as you configure it to be without bugs. Not that AWS doesn't allow for secure infastructure and you're basement is secure by default, but as a consultant I see clients when I ask them about security saying "We're secure because we use AWS.".

One should definitely not default into "we're secure because we use AWS". But let's be honest, how many servers in the basement feature video surveillance? How many destroy their hard disks securely? An honest statement would be "we reduced our burden of security by building on top of AWS".

Yeah! The amount of toil and burden AWS removes or reduces for me across the board (security, managed services, running multiple datacentres and everything necessary to do so…) means I can work on vastly more valuable things. Which more than makes up for the price.

The cost of 1 server is not a sufficient metric of value.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#278

Post by srtjstjsj »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #19
oriesdan wrote: post #7

I think the main reason they can afford pricing their services that high is because of peer pressure - probably itself the result of clever marketing, or that would be a really happy coincidence. I've worked in many startups now, several of them where I was the first (and for a while, only) developer and had to decide on the infrastructure. Each time I was going with OVH, and each time the CEO was trying to push for…

CEO changes his opinion when money runs out and a new CFO comes in to fix the costs - at least from my experience.

If you need a CFO to look at your IT bill and cut costs, your problem is likely BS title inflation crowding out real work.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#279

Post by dpedu »

jopsen wrote: post #275

How fast can you reset an instance on OVH? I personally wouldn't want a server to live longer than 48 hours :) (Unless it's a managed service)

Does it matter? I'm sure the machines backing EC2 live quite a long time. And that's OK depending on what they're used for.

Re: Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?

#280

Post by mr_toad »

thomaslord wrote: post #215
drchopchop wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS gives you all the things you'd need to scale, without heavy up-front costs. There's a natural path from small instances -> bigger instances -> load balancers/ELB -> reserved instances (or spot if it fits your workload). For a smaller company, any savings you'd get from owned servers would be offset by much higher dev ops costs. Plus, as mentioned, you get a vast menu of services to choose from, all of which are m…

> If your team is filled with devops engineers, then, sure, go with the non-AWS route. This seems backwards to me - running a simple VPS on something like OVH/DigitalOcean/Linode is a matter of creating the instance, setting the size, and setting up your server software. Super simple, and likely about the same complexity as setting up a dev environment. Setting the same thing up on AWS requires slogging through the d…

> Setting the same thing up on AWS

Having run a simple web server + database on both EC2 and Digital Ocean I disagree. The two services are nearly identical at that scale.

In fact I don’t see any significant differences between any of the proper cloud providers at this level. The cost & functionality are very nearly the same.

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